Two Essential Time-Saving Firefox Extensions

Many WebWorkerDaily readers use the Firefox browser, and if you do, today on OStatic we covered two extremely powerful Firefox extensions: Ubiquity and iMacros. Ubiquity adds a flexible natural language command line to Firefox, and is developed by the folks at Mozilla. iMacros sits in your Firefox toolbar, and lets you record tasks, whether they are frequently performed web development tasks, or simple tasks such as opening a series of tabs you use each day.

Here’s more on how these can be very useful for web workers.

Ubiquity is out in a new version 0.1.5 and even though Mozilla continues to refer to it as “experimental.” it’s already very useful. The new version adds interface and stability improvements, but the core utility of Ubiquity is the same: Aftery you hit Ctrl-Space to bring it up, it lets you type simple commands to get jobs done quickly.

As described and shown in the OStatic post, you can conjure Ubiquity up to quickly e-mail a web page to a web worker colleague, search across many search engines or services such as Wikipedia and Yelp, and convert and translate text, pages and documents. If you’ve ever used the useful pop-up utility Launchy, Ubiquity has a similar feel when it pops up, although its much more robust in terms of the commands you can give it.

iOpus, the maker of iMacros, now offers quite a few online demos and scripting examples in addition to the visual tour we’ve provided on OStatic. Like standard macros, this extension shines at taking repetitive tasks and letting you execute recorded steps for them, but my favorite use of all for it is Super Bookmarking. This allows you to record a series of macro-based steps that you can keep in Firefox’s Bookmarks menu, just as you do links to web pages. Take a tour of iMacros, if you dont already use it, and if you happen to be a web developer, it–along with Firebug–is an absolute must-have tool.